Schonfeld grew its investment team 21% and is still hiring
The top performing multi-strategy hedge fund so far this year isn't Citadel or Millennium... it's Schonfeld. After a dramatic end to 2023, the New York-based fund is up 13.1% in 2024. It's been hiring to foster that increased performance, particularly within its investment teams.
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Schonfeld's most recent SEC filings from mid-September reveal that the fund's headcount grew 11.2%, from 856 to 952. The bulk of those 94 hires were in investment and advisory functions; that division grew 21.3% from 310 employees to 376.
It's something of a recovery period at Schonfeld. In late 2023, the fund had ~1000 employees, but announced it was cutting 15% of its headcount after a proposed partnership with Millennium failed to materialize. Most of those eschewed were non-investment staff, however, so the makeup of the firm is evidently different today.
Schonfeld is continuing to grow. The fund had ~30 open roles in August and now has 43, including five internships. It's recruiting more quants than anything else, with nine full-time openings for quant researchers, developers and strategists. Those openings are outside the US, in the fund's London, Dubai and Hong Kong offices. There is a quant research internship currently open in New York, which can pay up to $4.2k per week in salary.
The fund is also hiring technologists to work on its generative AI platform, 'SchonGPT'. It's looking for a lead engineer with UI and UX experience to "lead the development and enhancement of SchonGPT and other internal tools." Schonfeld isn't the only hedge fund experimenting with its own GenAI chatbot; Balyasny has been hiring applied researchers for its proprietary 'BAMChatGPT'
Schonfeld's tech team, which has faced its fair share of criticism, has seen both incomings and outgoings. It brought in a new CTO, Thomas DeBow, but lost long-serving head of cybersecurity Marc Helfman.
Schonfeld declined an opportunity to comment.
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